Educator ~ Writer ~ Morgan Driver ~ Welshie Owner

Today, I am celebrating one year of Sundays at First United Methodist Church in Austin. While my actual calendar anniversary (or church-iversary) is tomorrow, today marks the Sunday a year ago that I walked into church because Bach had reminded me how much I loved music and I knew I wanted music in the life I was rebuilding. I found not only music, but also so much more of the self I had slowly lost over the sixteen years I had been taking care of both my parents.

As I sit here and write about this one amazing year, I think about how I had to be ready when joy came back, how I had to know what I needed to follow, though not necessarily what I needed to find, to make it back to the self I’d lost, to return to everything I’d put away and forgotten was true about who I was. And I had forgotten a lot, from a lot longer ago than just sixteen years. More than once someone has reminded me and I have had to think “oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot.”

I sat down with my journal earlier this week, which I had not written in for over a year, but which had started to fill with poetry again in the opening months of 2017. It was poetry I found again when I came to church. Three days after I walked into First, I was writing regularly again and the self I had given up, the life I had so much wanted to have, the person I had so much wanted to be, returned. I could not mistake the message I received that day and so many many many days after, so much so that by September, I had to laugh because it was clear God was simply showing off: Here is who you are. Here are your people. There is no mistake.

By December, I had completed an entire book manuscript that I never expected to be writing. I had come out of the wilderness I’d survived by following what I love and found myself in the completely right place after all. I have never felt that so strongly as I do now, as if the giant map of my life now reads you are here. I have nothing but gratitude for that and the joy that has come back into the life I am now building with it.

Someone asked me recently how I would describe an encounter with the Holy Spirit and I said, peace, deep peace.